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All of existence is contained in a super-dimensional field which is lethal to all Gods. This field – known as the Deity Obliteration Field – is undetectable to humans and any instrument humans have ever devised. It cannot be seen, felt or detected in any way and it is lethal to any God of any kind and Gods are the only conceivable beings that could posses the ability to perceive this field. It is especially lethal to any Gods that have the property of omnipotence or omniscience. Nothing – including Gods – can exist without this field – it is the prime requirement for anything at all to have the property of existing.

By definition, the moment a God starts to exist, its existence is summarily ended due to the Deity Obliteration Field.

Unless one can prove that the ODF does not exist, no God can exist by definition. If one is able to prove that the ODF does not exist, that same proof will be applied to the claim of any God existing thereby automatically proving that that God does not exist.

It therefore follows that either the existence of the ODF can be proven or it can’t be proven but it in either case no God can exist.

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The question is a serious one. I would love for a Christian – Catholic preferably – to explain to me what precisely their god is good for.

What’s your god good for anyway?

Make a list. All the things god might be good for. I can imagine what a number of things in that list might be.

I started considering this after I saw something on TV last night, which started a train of thought. Let me get to the point. I would like to understand what Christians do in their heads to make what is clearly an untenable, indefensible situation acceptable and defensible.

The situation I am referring to is the abject apathy from the deity which Christians label as ‘all loving’ and ‘all good’ and ‘all powerful’. I realise that any given number of Christians will come up with a similar number of apologies on behalf of their deity, to justify the disturbing lack of action on its part but even unreasonable people have to draw the line at some point.

What I can’t wrap my head around is how, on god’s green earth, does anybody justify the abject apathy from their deity when it comes to the rape and abuse – on an absolutely epic scale – committed by priests in the Catholic church against children.

People might not appreciate what I mean by ‘an absolutely epic scale’ so let me clarify that phrase for you. What I mean by ‘epic scale’ is this:

The report stated there were approximately 10,667 reported victims (younger than 18 years) of clergy sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002:

Around 81% of these victims were male.

Female victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests tended to be younger than the males. Data analyzed by John Jay researchers, shows that the number and proportion of sexual misconduct directed at girls under 8 years old was higher than that experienced by boys the same age.

22.6% were age 10 or younger, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% were between the ages to 15 to 17 years.

A substantial number (almost 2000) of very young children were victimized by priests during this time period.

9,281 victim surveys had information about an investigation. In 6,696 (72%) cases, an investigation of the allegation was carried out. Of these, 4,570 (80%) were substantiated; 1,028 (18%) were unsubstantiated; 83 (1.5%) were found to be false. In 56 cases, priests were reported to deny the allegations.

More than 10 percent of these allegations were characterized as not substantiated because diocese or order could not determine whether the alleged abuse actually took place.

For approximately 20 percent of the allegations, the priest was deceased or inactive at the time of the receipt of the allegation and typically no investigation was conducted in these circumstances.

In 38.4% of allegations, the abuse is alleged to have occurred within a single year, in 21.8% the alleged abuse lasted more than a year but less than 2 years, in 28% between 2 and 4 years, in 10.2% between 5 and 9 years and, in under 1%, 10 or more years.

Consider that for a minute. Then thousand victims. All younger than 18 years old. In 52 years. By only Catholic priests and in America alone. The Catholic church has been around for nigh on two thousand years and we know pretty damn well that for a thousand of those years – we call them the dark ages – some pretty heinous things were done in the name of that particular religion.

But wait, there’s more:

The Associated Press estimated the settlements of sex abuse cases from 1950 to 2007 totaled more than $2 billion. BishopAccountability puts the figure at more than $3 billion in 2012.

The Catholic church has, in the United States of America alone paid three billion dollars in settlements in 57 years for child abuse committed by its priests.

Let me sum up the problem that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. You’re a Christian, a Catholic perhaps. You say things like ‘god is good’, ‘god is great’, ‘god is love’, ‘god is all powerful’ and ‘all things are possible in god’ while every second day of every year a priest in the service of that god is literally raping a different child in America. Let me put that another way. In 52 years there have been – according to one report – 10,667 different victims. Reported victims. That’s not counting all the possible victims, of which I’m sure there are many more. If each victim was molested by a priest just twice – and to be blunt, a significant percentage of victim suffered over many years – it means that every day of every year and twice on weekends for the last 50 years a child was molested by a representative of the almighty creator of the universe in America alone. While this god watches. And does nothing.

Can you even begin to appreciate the scale of the horror? Could you sit idle and do nothing as little children beg you for help, to be saved from abuse, molestation, anal rape, every day of every week of every year for decades and decades? Could you even have a response of pure apathy?

So I ask Christians, if your god cannot – or will not – stop the rampant abuse and rape of innocent children on a truly gigantic scale in his own organisation, what precisely is that god good for?

To paraphrase a cogent meme:

If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That is the difference between me and your god.

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God can be a real bastard when he wants to be. If we were to allow – for the sake of argument obviously – that the Christian God of the Bible exists, then we have to admit that a lot of the time He is an absolute bastard.

Start the hoop jumping and twisting so long and have a go at explaining this delightful part of the ‘divine’ plan:

Pastor Infects Boy, 14, With HIV
…
The pastor was said to have used some games on his laptop and mobile phone to entice the boy, after which he lured him into his bedroom where he had unprotected sex with him.

The father later realized that his son frequently fell ill after he had returned from the pastor’s house. The man sent his son to the hospital and after a series of medical tests, it was confirmed that the boy was HIV positive.

The parent were tested too by the same medical facility and were found to be negative, raising fears that the victim might have been infected by the ‘man of God’, especially after he mentioned to his parent that he had been sodomized five times by the pastor.
…

So, help me out here since I’m having a hard time reconciling ‘good’, ‘loving’, ‘God’ and that story.

A man who represents God on earth, lures a child into his room where that man anally rapes the child – while God watches – and infects the child with HIV. Unless the parents of that child have some means, he’s not going to get the anti retrovirals he’s now going to need to survive until he’s 20.

I wonder of the good Lord provided the parents with enough money for anti retrovirals? I wonder if the child prayed to God to save him from the man ripping his anus apart?

Let’s say he did pray to God to stop the horror. God watches a man rape a child (maybe repeatedly) who begs to be saved and God’s response is: “No, fuck you, I’m trying to teach you something. Have some AIDS with that”.

That’s a bastard move in anybody’s book. Can a Christian or two do me a favour. Ask Jesus what the plan is with AIDS infected children since I can’t come up with a satisfactory reason to include the rape, suffering and murder of innocent children in any plan. I especially have a hard time with starving kids to death, with raping kids to death and with infecting kids with diseases that slowly kill them over years while suffering in the most terrible ways.

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Consider Christianity. A world-wide belief system, two thousand years in the making. Both the source of humanity’s most despicable behaviour and the inspiration for some of its greatest art and architecture. It is the collective name for a belief system consisting of more than 30,000 variations; each of which alleges to be the truth.

Christianity’s central tenet for most of it’s 30,000 variations is that: the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator of the universe – the one and only true God – impregnated a virgin human woman who bore God’s only son – who is partly God Himself. This son was later tortured and murdered but was resurrected three days after his human death. He later ascended bodily into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God. Humanity is born into sin because the original man who was personally created by God from dirt went against God’s express instructions and attained forbidden knowledge by eating the fruit of a tree that bestows knowledge of good and evil on the person who consumes its fruit, which was placed nearby by God himself. This original ‘sin’ affects all of this man’s descendants – which includes all of humanity on earth today – which condemns every human being to eternal damnation – eternal torture in a spiritual placed called Hell. That is, unless we – humans – accept that God’s son was and is real, was tortured and murdered on our behalf – was sacrificed and died on behalf of us so that our sins could be forgiven – and was resurrected and is alive again.

For the sake of argument let’s assume that this central tenet of Christianity is absolutely true.

Given that God – as defined above – is the first and final authority in the entire Universe and is the creator of all – natural and unnatural – laws, a number of the choices made by this deity is rather curious. It strikes me as rather odd that given every available option – and to God, every option is available by definition – He chose scapegoating as the one and only way for humans to have our sins forgiven and receive salvation.

Scapegoating: (from the verb “to scapegoat”) is the practice of singling out any party for unmerited negative treatment or blame as a scapegoat.

Scapegoat: (in the Bible) A goat sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it (Lev. 16)

Salvation: (Latin salvatio; Greek sōtēria; Hebrew yeshu’ah) is being saved or protected from harm or being saved or delivered from some dire situation. In religion, salvation is stated as the saving of the soul from sin and its consequences.

Sin: In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God’s will.

This choice of path to salvation (deliverance from sin and its consequences) is especially curious because God is the final judge, jury and authority in existence. God is the final authority, the only decider, the only decision maker when it comes to the salvation or damnation of a human being (and literally everything else in the Universe). There exists, by definition, nothing else which makes the binary choice between the eternal torture and eternal salvation of a human soul. Any requirement to attain salvation then exists purely to influence or finalise the decision that God makes; to fulfil or not the requirements set by God which are used by God to determine the outcome of the decision of salvation or damnation. The requirements for salvation are defined by the final authority – God – and by definition cannot be influenced by anything else.

Why, with every possible option available to him, did he choose not only a heinously barbaric act but even more perplexingly required that He himself – in human form – be tortured and murdered through that particular barbaric act? Why does God require that He be tortured and temporarily killed to appease himself? Why does God require that He in human form be made a scapegoat upon which all the sins – human actions that contract His will – of the entire world be heaped before being – bodily – killed. What is it about this masochistic/sadistic theatrical that gives God the ability to grant salvation over damnation?

Given that God is omnipotent, nothing can dictate anything to God and any decision made by God can only be influenced by God and anything that is, is only so because God chose for it to be so. Given that, God then had the choice between forgiving everybody whole-sale or requiring that he in human form be tortured and murdered and He chose the barbaric option. Why? He had the choice between forgiving Adam or condemning billions to eternal torture and yet chose eternal torture. He had the choice between requiring a three week fast followed by the sacrifice of a person’s favourite pet after painting their house green and living in a swamp for six months while learning to recite the bible forwards and backwards in three languages to attain salvation or requiring that the human form of himself be tortured and murdered. He has the option to require absolutely any arbitrary thing – help other people, make the world a better place, sing Kumbaja at dawn for three days on a mountain top – or have himself tortured and killed and for some bizarre reason he chooses the sado-masochistic scapegoating option of torture and deicide.

Why?

Given the definition of God, there is only one possible answer: it’s what He wants.

He wants billions to be tortured for eternity since by definition he can not want it and by definition will have it. He wanted to be tortured and murdered since by definition he could have not wanted it. He wants his existence to be as vague and questionable as possible. He wants people to suffer precisely as much as they suffer now and then to continue to suffer even more after they die by being tortured in Hell for eternity. He wants all of this since he has the option and power to want something different and have it; to have absolutely anything whichever way He pleases.

This level of malevolence is truly awe inspiring. Two billion people choose to worship this travesty of a being as the pinnacle of morality. Can there be anything more disturbing?

There is, of course, a much simpler explanation than living in a Universe which was designed and is directed by the most evil super being imaginable: we live in a Universe in which it is possible for humanity to imagine such an awe inspiringly evil super being.

I wonder what it means for us? That we are so willing to subjugate ourselves to the terrible mental fabrications of primitive people?

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God says he loves usbut he lets children dieAnd although you may ask himhe’ll never tell you why.The reason for his silencemay be more than you can bear,but your life will have more meaningwhen you realise he’s not there.